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Smiling UFC fighters more likely to catch a beating, study finds

At UFC 96, Gray Maynard (unsmiling) defeated Jim Miller (small smile) in a unanimous decision. A new study finds mixed martial artists who smile at their opponent before a match are more likely to lose their upcoming fight.Photo: Emotion/American Psychological Association

Misty Harris

Published: March 13, 2013 - 10:14 AM

Updated: March 13, 2013 - 4:04 PM

The outcome of the Ultimate Fighting Championship grudge match between Georges St-Pierre and Nick Diaz — taking place Saturday in Montreal — may be tipped before the fighters even step into the Octagon, if a new scientific study is any indication.

In analyzing 152 mixed martial artists’ weigh-in photos, wherein UFC competitors squared off in battle stance for the cameras, researchers found fighters who smiled were significantly more likely to lose their upcoming bout. Furthermore, the intensity of a pre-fight smile tended to predict overall performance, from the likelihood of being knocked down to the proportion of strikes landed versus received.

“When someone is stronger, more physically imposing, more skilled or maybe better-prepared, it’s going to affect your emotions. And that feeling of being less dominant, of being the beta male, is going to unintentionally leak out in smiles,” said Michael Kraus, the study’s co-author.

The research was designed to test the idea that a smile can be a sign of submission, just as bared teeth is one such signal among primates. The idea is that a fighter’s true sense of his ability to overcome an opponent is unintentionally revealed when he looks him in the face.

Smile intensity was coded by people naïve to the study’s intent, and fight statistics were collected from official UFC records.

“Across the board, looking at any indicator of performance in a fight, smiling fighters show worse outcomes,” said Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

“They tend to lose their fights the next day; they tend to land a lower percentage of significant strikes — punches or kicks intended to harm; the opponent lands more strikes on them, and they get punched more in the face; they get knocked down at a higher percentage.”

A separate experiment helped unpack the social signals sent by such an expression.

Nearly 180 people were shown headshots of the same fighter, who was either seen smiling or displaying a neutral look (those participants who recognized the martial artist were excluded from the results). Predictably, Kraus says a smile was interpreted as a sign of being “less aggressive and less hostile – and that judgment is correlated with perceptions of reduced dominance.”

These results dovetail with a 2012 Evolutionary Psychology study in which male athletes perceived as smiling in their headshots were presumed by observers to be more social and less physically commanding than those athletes who weren’t shown smiling.

Because Kraus’s study, published in the journal Emotion, draws exclusively on male competitors, he cautions that the same effect might not hold true for women. But when sizing up a fight between two men — even controlling for ability and height — it seems the slightest sign of appeasement can cue the outcome.

“In regular social interactions, a smile can diffuse a confrontation. But here, these guys are being paid to fight,” said Kraus. “Basically, if you’re smiling before a fight, you’re leaking information about your reduced dominance. And this plays out in the actual event the next day.”